Wise: Design Challenge
Encouraging users to save
Role
UX Design, UI Design
Category
Mobile Design
Duration
48 hours
Tools
Figma
I attended UX Playbook’s Job Sprint cohort, a 6-week UX intensive course, with 5 other students.
Each student was asked to complete a unique 48 hour design challenge as part of a mock hiring process.
My challenge was to design a feature for Wise that encourages users to save more.
This is how I built a prototype for my proposed solution – the savings tracker.
Our solution was to be presented within 5 minutes, followed by Q&A, and feedback was provided by instructors Christopher Nguyen and Bryant Castro.
If you’re short on time, check out the recording below.
Challenge
We want to expand our personal finance tools, we're exploring a feature to help users save more.
We hear things like:
"It feels like I never save enough!"
"I typically spend more than I save"
"I have saving goals, but rarely meet them"
Can you design a feature which encourages users to save?
Users want transparency, ease of use and low transaction costs
I reviewed Wise customer personas to understand their users.
Wise serves a few main user groups:
Immigrants sending money to their families back home
People from the US moving abroad
University students with family abroad.
Each group has unique needs, but a common theme across all groups is a strong preference for:
Transparency
Ease of use
Low transaction costs
Features like Jars and Interest already exist - how might we leverage these tools so that Wise is more successful at helping users stick to their savings goals.
I started by auditing the current app experience and the tools Wise currently provides to help users save:
Jars:
Accounts specifically for saving - they cant be spent from but they can be designated for specific savings goals.
Interest:
Allows users to invest money sitting in their Balance or Jars and earn a return on it while its held there. Most competitors like banks/ other fintechs offer interest to entice customers to hold their money with them, so this is an important tool to encourage users to save with Wise.
These features haven’t been enough to encourage users to save.
How might we improve the existing experience so that Wise is able to increase the funds remaining in users’ accounts at the end of the month.
While reviewing the Wise app, I noticed almost immediately that it wasn't clear how to set up recurring transfers.
Digging through the help centre it seems like its possible, but since it's such an impactful way to help people save, this could be an important area to improve.
Competitors are using features like “Spare Change” and “Recurring Funding” to encourage users to save.
Koho is well known for helping their users build good money habits - including sticking to their savings goals.
They have accounts similar to Wise's Jars - called vaults.
They offer a "RoundUp" feature - that rounds up each of your purchases and saves the difference automatically.And they allow users to set up savings goals and track their progress towards them.
Revolut also offers Vaults and they put a lot of emphasis on automatic transfers like "spare change" similar to Koho's round up feature and "recurring funding".
Revolut even shares the same statistic I did earlier - that recurring funding helps their users save twice as much.
Building a solution tailored for Wise and their users
The spare change feature seemed compelling - and from my experience working in fintech I know users love it, but the metric of success for this project is to maximize the amount that’s left in accounts at the end of each month and so a feature that relies on spending may not be the best approach.
Circling back to the user needs I identified - target users appreciate increased transparency and ease of use.
My recommendation is to offer a “savings tracker” feature – one thats quick to set up, and gives users insight into their progress towards important goals.
Inspired by habit tracking and productivity apps, a progress tracker is a proven approach to motivate users. One that we could use to motivate Wise users to save and make it easier for them to keep a tab on their how well they’re progressing towards their savings goals over time.
Open Jar
The typical Wise experience starts with setting up your profile, and opening a new account.
Set goal
Where I've added to this experience, is taking users through a few extra steps to set up their savings goal beyond just giving it a name.
Set goal date or frequency + value of deposits
The user can select either an "accomplish by" date which would pre-populate the deposit amount and frequency for them or they can set the deposit amount and frequency and see the date adjusted accordingly
Jar (Account) screen with goal and progress bar
Here they can see their goal, how much is in the Jar, the goal date, their progress, whether or not they're on track, and when the next deposit is expected to come through.
Time permitting, I would have liked to design a screen that would provide the user with insights after they click the goal card. In a scenario where they’re “off track”, insights could include how far off track they are: what an updated "goal date" would be if they reduced their recurring deposit or how large of a one-time deposit they would need to make to reach the goal by the original date they set.
Next Steps
How many of Wise users would take advantage of this feature?
The next step would involve user testing to see how many of Wise target users would take advantage of this feature and actually find it useful.
One concern I have is that a majority of users are sending money back to family in other countries - would they be hesitant to save because they feel like any extra should go home?
This would be an important group that I’d want to perform more research and testing with to see if this feature accomplishes the goal of encouraging them to save given their unique circumstances and obligations to family. Or if changes can be made to help this feature fit their lifestyle.
Additional metrics I think will be important to track:
I also suggest a few other important metrics to track the success of the feature:
How many recurring deposits are set up.
How many people set up a savings goal.
Cross-sell for users using transfers right now - how many start using banking products.